Barnes may be smiling all right, but it's just for the cameras. On the inside, he is frowning nervously. You can bet on that.

As the weeks and days grow shorter before the election, nearly all signs look good for Barnes. He has raised record amounts of money and poured millions into TV and radio advertising and slick direct-mail pieces. His polls look good, despite his numerous controversies. Most voters couldn't pick his GOP opponent Sonny Perdue out of a police lineup, even if Perdue had a dead rat hanging around his neck. Many citizens have never heard of Perdue, and they sure don't know what he stands for.

In truth, things look so good for Barnes that they look bad.

He has so many optimistic bulbs flashing around his head that he may have difficulty energizing his voters on Election Day. He may appear to be so far ahead that he will lose.

Such a political drama has played here before.

In 1970 former Gov. Carl Sanders appeared to be a shoo-in to return to the governor's office (after an absence of four years) against Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter, who was counting on the rural vote and the old segregationist crowd to make a race of it.

Sanders' TV was wonderful; Carter looked like a fieldhand. The Atlanta and Augusta business communities lined up solidly behind Sanders and funneled money into his campaign.

Toward the end of the race, reporters began to notice little things: Sanders would greet factory workers at closing time and hand out his leaflets. The workers often didn't even glance at Sanders or his pamphlets. They simply threw them on the ground. Not a good sign.

At social gatherings, suits would dash up to reporters covering the campaign to declare: ''Carl is going to win!'' Then they'd say sotto voce: ''But I'm not going to vote for him.''

On Election Day, Sanders' folks took their candidate for granted, and many didn't bother to vote. The wool-hats and the city haters, believing falsely that Carter was one of theirs, turned out in droves, and Carter won.

A variation of the same scenario occurred in 1980. Zell Miller attacked entrenched U.S. Sen. Herman Talmadge in the primary. Miller and his friends laid out all of Talmadge's dirty laundry for the world to see. Didn't matter. Talmadge was too strong, his friends too loyal. They whipped Zell good in the primary -- then sat back and smiled.

Mack Mattingly, a Republican typewriter salesman from Indiana who had moved to St. Simons, decided he would tackle Talmadge in the general election.

Talmadge's people were so confident about victory that they did not even conduct a poll before the election. If they had, they would have discovered that it did not matter who opposed Talmadge in the election. The voters had decided to fire the old senator, and they did. Mattingly just happened to be standing in the right place at the right time and picked up the Senate seat.

(A kindly but not very assertive fellow, Mattingly later lost the Senate seat to Congressman Wyche Fowler in 1986 and was defeated again for the Senate in 2000 by Zell Miller.)

The moral of this story, for Gov. Barnes at least, is this: Don't count your votes before they are cast. If you want to win, mountains of TV advertising are not enough. You must motivate your people (in Barnes' case, that means blacks, women and a handful of white males) to vote on Election Day, rain or shine, sleet or snow.

Otherwise, you'll be the de facto governor emeritus on Nov. 6.

This endorsement-term election is not similar to Joe Frank Harris' or George Busbee's second tries when they had almost no political baggage to worry about. Or even Zell Miller's, in which the only stumbling block was a failed attempt to change the flag. Barnes has a long series of negative hurdles to clear -- the changed flag, school reform, transportation issues, and, perhaps most damaging, a perception that the slow-talking lawyer from Mableton may be too much the activist for non-urban Georgia.